Ember

by Ophelia Sexton

  Ember (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 9)

  By Ophelia Sexton

  Published by Philtata Press

  Text copyright 2019 by Ophelia Sexton. All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Jacqueline Sweet

  Sabertooth cat photo by Trisha Shears

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  For KadyG, my invisible-but-not-imaginary professional chef friend on my favorite online forum—thank you for sharing your experiences, anecdotes, and menus, and above all, for being so generous with your answers to my questions about working as a professional chef!

  And for my sister...who's also my best friend. Thanks for being the Elle to my Margaret. Love you!

  Excerpt

  Margaret saw the moment when Daniel's beast rose inside him, a tide of gold sweeping across his green eyes. He stepped close, pushing her against the cool, unyielding edge of the countertop. His lean, muscular body pressed against her from belly to breasts. His scarred hands cupped her face firmly, his palms and fingers feverishly hot against her cheeks and jaw.

  Daniel growled low in his throat, and the sound sent a thrill of anticipation through her as he bent his head. But instead of the savage kiss she was expecting—maybe even hoping for—his mouth was gentle as it closed over hers, his lips almost chaste as they lingered against hers in a warm caress.

  But the fire that his mouth kindled deep in her belly was anything but chaste. It raced through her, starting a hot, insistent throbbing between her legs.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One – Wake Up Call

  Chapter Two – Memorial Day

  Chapter Three – Scene of the Crime

  Chapter Four – Refugees

  Chapter Five – Unexpected Guests

  Chapter Six – Gimme Shelter

  Chapter Seven – Nightmare

  Chapter Eight – Connection

  Chapter Nine – Shifter Soccer

  Chapter Ten – Awakenings

  Chapter Eleven – Irresistible

  Chapter Twelve – Unexpected Revelation

  Chapter Thirteen – A Shopping Trip

  Chapter Fourteen – First Responders

  Chapter Fifteen – Sugar and Spice

  Chapter Sixteen – Sweet Seduction

  Chapter Seventeen - Dessert

  Chapter Eighteen – The Morning After

  Chapter Nineteen – Concerned Parties

  Chapter Twenty – Commitment Issues

  Chapter Twenty-One – A Feast for the Senses

  Chapter Twenty-Two – Hard Questions

  Chapter Twenty-Three – Volunteer Spirit

  Chapter Twenty-Four – Stay with Me

  Chapter Twenty-Five – Making a Move

  Chapter Twenty-Six - A Walk on the Wild Side

  Chapter Twenty-Seven – Unexpected Confession

  Chapter Twenty-Eight – Oxygen Mask

  Chapter Twenty-Nine – Call of Duty

  Chapter Thirty – Respect

  Chapter Thirty-One – Things Fall Apart

  Chapter Thirty-Two – Shattered Dreams

  Chapter Thirty-Three – A Light at the End of the Tunnel

  Chapter Thirty-Four – Pride of Ownership

  Chapter Thirty-Five – Red in Tooth and Claw

  Chapter Thirty-Six – A Place to Call Home

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - Happily Ever After

  Books by Ophelia Sexton

  Chapter One – Wake Up Call

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Friday, September 14

  It wasn't normal for Lizbeth Tyson to call at three-fucking-a.m. in the morning.

  Jolted awake from a deep sleep, Daniel Langlais grabbed his bedside phone without peering at the caller ID and snarled, "This had better be a goddamned emergency!"

  Exhaustion weighed him down like a lead-lined blanket, and his eyes felt gritty, as if someone had kicked sand into them.

  He'd only gotten home from the restaurant at midnight after working both the lunch and dinner shifts, then supervising the kitchen clean-up after service ended. As the Desert Bayou's executive chef, he always tried to be the first person to show up in the kitchen and the last to go home.

  "Dan, Alicia and Tommy are dead!" Lizbeth's voice was hoarse with terror. "And they're coming for you next. Grab the kid and get out now."

  "What—? Who's coming?" His fatigue dissipated instantly. Daniel rolled out of bed in a smooth motion, and took two quick steps to his bedroom window.

  His heart pounding and his senses on high alert, he parted the blinds and peered out. The nighttime scene was lit an eerie yellow by the sodium vapor streetlights standing just beyond the hip-high adobe wall that marked the perimeter of his front yard.

  Nothing moved except for a few moths fluttering around his porchlight.

  Like Daniel, Lizbeth was an unranked member of the Sandia Mountain Pride of sabertooth cat shifters. She was a CPA and not the kind of person who pulled pranks. If she sounded scared out of her mind, then she truly was.

  And Alicia and Tommy Nekomi lived in the Cherry Hills neighborhood, miles away in the Cherry Hills neighborhood on the north end of Albuquerque.

  Even if Daniel jumped in his Jeep now, gunned it, and broke every traffic law between his house and hers, it would take at least twenty minutes to get there. Along with Lizbeth and Jeff Byouki, they formed the Sandia Mountain Pride Steering Committee, the closest thing that the pride had to leaders right now.

  "Aaron Messerzahn and his goons—" Lizbeth began. Her words broke off with a gasp.

  And Daniel heard a dull thud in the background.

  He was intimately familiar with the sound of a door being kicked in from his tours of duty. It haunted his nightmares. And back then, he'd been one of the guys doing the kicking. Not the one on the receiving end of a home invasion.

  "Shit." Lizbeth's voice cracked. "Daniel, they're here! I have to go!"

  "Lizbeth," Daniel said urgently. "Can you get to my pla—"

  The call disconnected.

  Daniel stared at the phone in his hand, his heart pounding, hating how helpless he felt.

  Lizbeth lived just a couple of blocks away. But if he left now to rush to her aid, he'd either have to take Chris with him into a dangerous situation, or leave him here at the house, alone and unprotected.

  Neither of these was a viable option.

  Daniel cursed under his breath. He couldn't call the cops, not when this was clearly a shifter matter.

  Ordinary humans who got mixed up in pride business usually ended up dead.

  Daniel knew that consequence better than most.

  He threw his phone into the "go" duffel bag he had kept packed ever since his brother Pete had been arrested. At the time, Daniel didn't know whether their secret existence as sabertooth shifters would be exposed by the Ordinary human journalist who had been investigating the death of Pete's police partner Richard Montoya.

  After a split-second of consideration, Daniel grabbed his knife roll, the soft bag which held all of his chef's knives and other supplies, and tossed it into the bag, too. If he had to evac tonight, he'd be damned if he left the tools of his trade behind.

  Then he ran into his nephew's bedroom, his mind racing through the possibilities.

  He knew who Aaron Messerzahn was. The big sabertooth shifter and his two buddies from California had blown into town a week ago. He'd been
cornering pride members, asking a lot of questions.

  With the upper echelons of the Sandia Mountain Pride in prison, Daniel and the remaining rank-and-file members of the pride had known that things were ripe for a takeover. And Messerzahn seemed ambitious and dominant enough to try for the role, especially with little or no opposition remaining.

  Standard operating procedure was that pride leadership was decided via challenge duels between newcomers and the higher-ranked members of the pride.

  If you were an unranked pride member, you kept your head down and let the bigwigs sort things out with tooth and claw. If the newcomers won, you waited for the dust to settle, then you swore your loyalty to the new group of leaders and began paying your monthly tithes to them.

  That's what had happened when Daniel's mother Sylvie Langlais had mated the Sandia Mountain Pride First, fought her way up the ranks to become the pride's Second, then eventually became Pride First after Daniel's stepfather was killed in a car accident.

  But if Alicia and Tommy were really dead, and Lizbeth felt she was in danger, then whoever was staging the takeover was doing it old-style by killing the pride's current leadership committee.

  A committee that Daniel had been part of until last month, when he'd resigned because of the demands of his job.

  Shit.

  Daniel couldn't afford to waste any time. He grabbed Chris's shoulder and roughly shook his ten-year-old nephew awake.

  Chris reacted by trying to burrow under his light comforter.

  "It's not time for school yet, Uncle Dan," he groaned.

  "Emergency," Daniel said, tersely. "Code red."

  He saw the boy come instantly awake.

  "What's going on?"

  "I don't know, Junior, but Lizbeth just phoned me to tell me that we're in danger." Daniel bent and scooped up a pair of sneakers from the pile of dirty laundry on the floor. "Put these on. Hurry."

  The boy cast him a fearful glance before taking the sneakers and shoving his bare feet into them. When Chris was younger, Lizbeth had often served as his childcare while Daniel was working long hours at the restaurant.

  Daniel had deliberately not turned on any of the house's interior lights. Sabertooth shifters had excellent night vision and there was enough light filtering through the blinds that he could see Chris's worried expression.

  "Good," he told his nephew when Chris was properly shod.

  The boy was panting and he smelled of anxiety, but he was keeping it under control. Good.

  He handed his nephew the "go" bag. "You remember what to do, right, Junior?"

  Chris nodded. "I put it on the back seat of the Jeep. I don't leave the car without it."

  "Good," Daniel said again. "Okay, let's go."

  Then he heard it. The sound of a vehicle pulling into his driveway, blocking in his Jeep.

  Daniel's sense of impending danger spiked.

  Dammit. Lizbeth was right!

  This was a quiet neighborhood, and Daniel couldn't think of any friendly who'd just drop in for a visit in the middle of the night.

  "Shit." He normally tried not to swear around his nephew, but if Lizbeth had been right about Messerzahn's buddies coming for Daniel and Chris, then Daniel had just lost his chance to put Chris in his Jeep and peel out of here.

  They could try making a run for it on foot, but the very last thing Daniel wanted was to find himself and Chris outside, on foot, and surrounded by an unknown number of hostile shifters. Staying inside the house wasn't a great option, but it was a hell of a lot better than being caught outside with no cover and no defensible perimeter.

  Daniel's house was reasonably secure...against Ordinary intruders. The walls were made of thick traditional adobe, plastered a warm ocher gold, with the window frames and front door painted bright turquoise-blue. There were decorative wrought-iron grilles over all the windows, and his house still had the original solid oak front door.

  And Daniel had one huge advantage. He was awake and he knew that enemies were coming.

  Thank you for the warning, Lizbeth, Daniel thought with gratitude. I hope to God they just roughed you up a little.

  While Daniel might just be one of the rank-and-file members of the pride, he was not helpless.

  There was a big difference between not being interested in fighting his way up through the ranks of his pride, and not being able to fight at all. He did experience a quick pang of regret about not owning a gun. After receiving his honorable discharge, he had tried to leave everything related to his deployments behind.

  And up until tonight, there had been no reason to think that a full-grown male sabertooth shifter would ever need a gun to defend himself. Even in his human form, Daniel knew he was more than a match for any Ordinary burglar or would-be carjacker.

  Daniel began to strip out of the t-shirt and briefs he slept in.

  "Change of plans," he snapped at Chris. "Go hide in the hall closet."

  Instead of obeying, Chris just stared at him. "Why?"

  Daniel paused, his t-shirt hitched up halfway over his shoulders. "Because it's the only room in this house without windows. Only one way in or out—which makes it a trap, but a trap I can defend. Go. And don't come out until you hear my safe word."

  "Okay." Chris might be young, but he wasn't stupid, thank God.

  He ran for the closet without any further questions, taking the "go" bag with him. Daniel heard the soft swish of fabric as Chris pushed aside the coats that hung there. Then the closet door closed quietly behind his nephew.

  Now it was Daniel's duty to make sure nothing got past him. He knew he couldn't call the cops—most of the APD force was made up of Ordinary humans. Bringing them into the middle of a shifter battle would put them in deadly danger.

  Daniel was on his own. Just like he'd always been.

  Do I have enough time to shift?

  Messerzahn's goons had been in human shape when they had attacked Lizbeth's home. Chances were that the guys coming for him hadn't bothered to shift into their cat shapes. Trying to drive around town, even at this hour, with a couple of large, supposedly-extinct beasts in a car would attract the kind of attention that Messerzahn's goons wanted to avoid.

  Plus, they'd be expecting Daniel to be fast asleep and unable to put up any kind of real resistance to a sneak attack.

  Daniel intended to show them just how wrong they were. He hadn't heard anyone open a car door yet, so they were probably parked in his driveway, discussing strategy and observing the terrain.

  He decided to gamble and let his cat take over.

  As always, shifting was agonizingly painful.

  In the aftermath, Daniel crouched panting on the hallway tiles, his vision blurred with pain, his muscles twitching and trembling.

  Other shifter lineages could shift twice as fast and nearly painlessly, and they needed hardly any recovery time. But sabertooth shifters were an ancient lineage, and some things were more difficult.

  With an effort of will, Daniel forced himself to rise to four feet. He swayed and shook his head to clear his blurry vision.

  Like any proper ambush hunter, he intended to get the drop on anyone who tried to break in to his home.

  If Messerzahn and his thugs really were planning to force their way in here and attack him, then Daniel needed to bring his "A" game. He didn't know how many shifters to expect, and whether they'd all be in human shape like he hoped.

  Moving silently, he withdrew behind the long peninsula that separated his kitchen from the living room area. The hallway closet that concealed Chris was just to his left, and the short entryway hall and his front door were in front and to his right.

  Daniel twitched his ears in the direction of the closet to check on his nephew. He heard Chris panting, the sound harsh but muffled by the fabric surrounding him.

  Not good. At least Chris wasn't moving around. Daniel would have to hope that would be enough to keep the guys currently parked outside his home from finding the boy right away.

  Chris was
a good kid, in general.

  Daniel had never found a mate of his own—there had been a time when he was dating a lot, but his cat had never reacted to anyone, Ordinary or shifter, that way. He'd made do over the years with a succession of girlfriends and one-night stands, but when his fortieth birthday had receded in his rearview mirror, he'd resigned himself to never having a mate and family of his own.

  Maybe it was PTSD from his deployments. Maybe he was just broken inside. Maybe the empty place inside his heart was never meant to be filled.

  Then Daniel's little brother Pete managed to get himself caught up in the monumental clusterfuck hatched by the pride's then-First, Philippe Bertrand.

  As a result, all of the Sandia Mountain Pride's surviving ranked members—including Pete, who was now technically Pride First—had ended up either dead or in prison, leaving the unranked pride members to fend for themselves.